Sorry to be so green, and I apologize if this issue has already been addressed somewhere the forums. If a definition is elusive, a list of example projects would be helpful.
Thanks!
What is Digital Humanities?
(8 posts) (7 voices)-
Bethany Nowviskie
AdminBest AnswerWelcome to the DHanswers forum! This is a great question, and not all all too basic! I'm sure you'll get many responses, because the definition of the "digital humanities" is something that an international and very diverse community of scholars and practioners is continually formulating -- rethinking, questioning, and demonstrating through projects and collaborations of different sorts.
Our definitions are often therefore a little muddy. (Melissa Terras, in a great keynote presentation at last summer's annual Digital Humanities conference, called the entire community to task for hemming and hawing: "It's... kinda the intersection of...") We need to get better at this! So I'm looking forward to the answers you get.
In the meantime, I'll point you to a few existing attempts and conversations.
The new CUNY Digital Humanities Initiative has put out a fantastic beginner's Resource Guide to the Digital Humanities, which includes a set of links on definitions, but -- even better -- some great pages on sample projects, basic readings, and "hot topics" in DH, which will give you a terrific overview of the scene.
Patrick Svensson has a solid piece (one in a series) in Digital Humanities Quarterly called "The Landscape of Digital Humanities."
A recent post by a UVa graduate student, Chris Forster, on the HASTAC Scholar blogs, attempted to define DH. I recommend it highly, both for Chris's smart formulation of four areas of activity (the use of computational methods for research that couldn't be done any other way; "new media" media studies; the ways technology reshapes the humanities classroom; and the ways it reshapes scholarly communication and the roles in the academy) and for the spirited discussion that followed.
Finally, there's a great project out of the University of Alberta, called the "Day in the Life of the Digital Humanities." For the past two years, they've hosted an event in which, for one day, digital humanists from all areas of the field (scholars, administrators, developers, librarians, archivists, students, researchers) blog about and reflect on what they do. The sign-up process allows you to offer your own personal definition of the digital humanities, and some of those definitions have been published online.
(PS: when I was in grad school -- not that long ago! -- we all called it "humanities computing." Now, as a digital humanities administrator at a major research library, the question I hear most from colleagues outside the DH community is whether it even needs a name. Are these just the new humanities, the "new normal?")
Posted 8 years ago Permalink -
Replying to @Nicholas Pavkovic's post:
Hello, Nicholas! I'll echo Bethany's answer -- there's no solidity yet in the various definitions of digital humanities. Perhaps this is because we're still continually discovering new things we can do with DH tools and methods, so maybe it's that we can't answer that question yet. Of course, that doesn't stop anyone from trying.
I keep coming back to Espen Aarseth definition of ergodic literature in his book Cybertext: it's literature in which "nontrivial effort is required to allow the reader to traverse the text." (See Noah Wardrip Fruin's discussion of this statement here.) I've modified it a bit: when someone asks me what DH is, I usually say any activity that requires non-trivial computation in the course of teaching and research in any humanities field. In this case, non-trivial means that word processing doesn't count. :)
Of course, now that I look at it, I see that for me, DH = activity. That's about right. This is a culture of participation. Glad to have you with us!
Posted 8 years ago Permalink -
Replying to @Nicholas Pavkovic's post:
I have an essay coming out later this year in ADE Bulletin entitled, you guessed it, "What is Digital Humanities and What's it Doing in Your English Department?" (It's based on an earlier talk entitled "What is Digital Humanities and Why are They Saying Such Terrible Things About It?") Anyway, I like Bethany's answer too, but fwiw here's the money quote from my piece:
"Digital humanities, which began as a term of consensus amongst a relatively small group of researchers is now backed on a growing number of campuses by a level of funding, infrastructure, and administrative commitments that would have been unthinkable even a decade ago. Even more recently, I would argue, the network effects of blogs and Twitter at a moment when the academy itself is facing massive and often wrenching changes linked both to new technologies and the changing political and economic landscape has led to the construction of “digital humanities” as a free floating signifier, one which increasingly serves to focus the anxiety and even outrage of individual scholars over their own lack of agency amid the turmoil in their institutions and profession. This is manifested in the intensity of debates around open access publishing, where faculty increasingly demand the right to retain ownership of their own scholarship—meaning, their own labor--and disseminate it freely to an audience apart from or in parallel with more traditional structures of academic publishing, which in turn are perceived as outgrowths of dysfunctional and outmoded practices surrounding peer review, tenure, and promotion.
"Whatever else it might be then, the digital humanities today is about a scholarship (and a pedagogy) that is publicly visible in ways to which we are generally unaccustomed, a scholarship and pedagogy that’s bound up with infrastructure in ways that are deeper and more explicit than we are generally accustomed, a scholarship and pedagogy that is collaborative and depends on networks of people and that lives an active, 24/7 life online. Isn’t that something you want in your English department?"
Comments welcome.
Posted 8 years ago Permalink -
Replying to @mkirschenbaum's post:
Btw, ADE Bulletin normally departmental subscription access only. Successfully lobbied editor to make my piece, as well as neighboring contributions by Kathleen Fitzpatrick and Kate Hayles, available open access.
Posted 8 years ago Permalink -
Replying to @mkirschenbaum's post:
Way to score one for the team, Matt!
Posted 8 years ago Permalink -
Like Bethany said, and as you've seen already, there are lots of floating definitions. One place to look for at least some ideas is in the variety of "Digital Humanities" tenure-track positions I've seen advertised over the last few months. However, I'd say that digital humanities is not limited to TT gigs. Instead, I'd say that one pervasive characteristic of digital humanities is the number of people not in TT positions who do digital humanities.
Here's another approach to responding. You might be a digital humanist if:
- You use emerging technologies to rethink what "the humanities" is all about.
- You collaborate with people across disciplines and backgrounds to explore innovations in academia
- You are willing to experiment with new pedagogies and research approaches made possible by new technologies
- You are not afraid to work closely and collaboratively with your friendly neighborhood technologist
- You are willing to take a do it yourself approach to creating the tools and technologies you need for your teaching and/research
- You use technology in a way that disregards traditional boundaries between disciplines and hierarchies
I'm sure others will have different and additional perspectives, but that's what springs to my mind first.
Posted 8 years ago Permalink -
Elizabeth Glascock
MemberReplying to @mkirschenbaum's post:
I saw your talk "What is Digital Humanities and Why are They Saying Such Terrible Things About It?" at Loyola this past Spring. It was edifying - THANK YOU!
Posted 8 years ago Permalink
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